WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 137: Trial (2)
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Just then, new people entered. Solidly built combatants. The man at the front scanned the room, then fixed his gaze on Han Gyeoul and Joanna. His face tightened into a frown.
Chadwick gestured.
“Go ahead and introduce yourselves. This is Captain Colin Fowler of the mobile strike force ‘White Skull’ and assorted others, and over here are our new Lieutenant Han Gyeoul and FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joanna Gibson.”
The man shot back in a deep voice.
“Thanks for the lazy introduction, pothead team leader.”
“Do not mention it.”
The Captain pulled down the half-mask painted with a skull. A crooked mouth and scars came into view. Han Gyeoul and Joanna, who had risen from their seats, saluted first. The Captain returned the salute and looked at them with complicated eyes. First Han Gyeoul, then Joanna. The second look lasted a long while. With an uncomfortable expression, he spat out,
“Of all things, the FBI Supervisory Special Agent is a woman. What a headache.”
Joanna answered quietly.
“You are being rather rude for a first meeting, Captain.”
“I apologize if I offended you. But this is sincere advice. Why not ask them to send someone else? This is no place for a woman.”
Should he step in? Han Gyeoul hesitated. Joanna herself remained calm. In the meantime, the Captain chose his seat. He dropped into it, let out a long sigh, then rubbed his face with dry hands as if he were exhausted.
“Agent. Lieutenant. I may look like a damn macho bastard, but despite appearances, I hate gender discrimination. Just as there are men better than women, there are women better than men. Anyone would admit that, except for Texas hicks. But there is one undeniable fact. Once a month, women have days when they cannot help being weaker... Do you know how your predecessor died?”
“Yes. I heard they were caught in a firefight.”
“They took several rounds. The one that hit here was fatal.”
The Captain jabbed at the area above his right eye.
“The round punched through the helmet, broke the skull, and went into the brain. It was a 5.8-millimeter round the Chinese bastards sold to gangs. It would have been better if they had died instantly, but they stayed alive for three more days and nights.”
“And?”
When Joanna’s response came back flat, the Captain furrowed his brow.
“You cannot just sit around doing nothing because you are the FBI Supervisory Special Agent here. We need every bit of combat strength we can get. Everyone has to be ready at all times. That means it is hard to give one person special treatment.”
“I will make sure you do not need to worry.”
“Will you? I doubt you have already hit menopause.”
“Killing people on my period is a hobby of mine. It helps quite a bit with stress relief.”
“Hah.”
Captain Fowler gave a low snort.
“I look forward to it. After the briefing, let us see what you can do. Same goes for Lieutenant Han beside you. My men and I only believe what we see with our own eyes. You will have to prove you are not just some Hollywood star.”
“Understood.”
The sharp exchange ended, for the moment, with Han Gyeoul’s reply. Joanna’s complexion had not changed in the slightest, but the physical tension that had eased after Han Gyeoul arrived was starting to return.
There was still time before things began in earnest. Plenty of seats remained empty. Han Gyeoul took out his notebook. Scratch, scratch. From the outside, he looked as if he were reviewing documents and taking notes, but what he was actually writing was a message to Joanna.
Under the table, he tapped her knee. Without letting it show, she shifted her attention.
[Were you offended?]
Joanna took out a notebook as well. Her true thoughts appeared quickly in her steady handwriting.
[I would be lying if I said it did not bother me at all, but I understand. When lives are on the line, everyone gets sensitive. I am used to it too. This is hardly the first time I have dealt with this in the field.]
[I am glad you are all right, Anne... But even so, acting like that from the first meeting is a problem. Especially from a commander, of all people, who always needs to make rational judgments. What are the odds that a situation urgent enough to make one person matter that much happens to break out on those exact days?]
[That is true.]
[It is either discrimination pretending not to be discrimination, deliberate isolation, or he is taking out the stress of a long-term mission on the wrong person. I do not like any of those.]
[Your writing is pressed down hard. Thank you for getting angry for me. :-) ]
Han Gyeoul tilted his head. He looked over the sentence he had written. He had not put any particular emotion into it, but as he focused without distraction, the writing had grown darker and deeper. Hmm. It was not a misunderstanding he needed to clear up.
The investigator poked her lips with the end of her pen, then wrote again.
[If that man were CIA, I would call it inter-agency rivalry and see it as isolation, but the Captain is only a military collaborator pulled in like you are. Since he is from Force Recon, he probably did have some contempt for women. He is a Marine, after all. But openly showing it is another matter. I am the FBI Supervisory Special Agent, after all. Accumulated mental fatigue is likely the biggest problem. There must be other factors as well.]
[That is worrying in its own way.]
[In an environment like this, I doubt it can be helped. People have limits. I am reminded of the baby we saw on the way from Fort Baker to Angel Island. If I assume he has been dealing with things like that continuously, I do wonder whether I could look any better than the Captain.]
[I am not so sure. Even the understanding you are showing now is impressive.]
[I learned it through trial and error. I too often snapped at colleagues or subordinates for no reason when I was assigned to long-term missions. Usually, after returning, we made up through apologies and getting thoroughly drunk, but sometimes that did not happen. Even when we had saved each other’s lives. I said things I should never have said. The awkwardness I felt whenever I saw their faces was a hard regret to endure.]
A deep heart. Could good people really be this common? At times like this, Han Gyeoul felt reality peeling away. As though every sense were being stripped from his skin, telling him this was Virtual Reality after all. Perhaps this was simply the verisimilitude of a bygone era. To Han Gyeoul, who had lived and died in his own lifetime, it was a difficult possibility to accept.
[That was the public Joanna Gibson. Privately, I think that bastard is an asshole.]
The sudden line nearly made Han Gyeoul burst into laughter. Since his dry heart rarely felt joy, he had grown weak against laughter. Han Gyeoul replied with his pen.
[What was that? Did you suddenly get embarrassed?]
[I thought I sounded too smug.]
After drawing another emoticon, she ended the written conversation.
[Let us talk about the rest later. At this rate, we will get caught.]
Han Gyeoul answered by putting down his pen. Perhaps worried about getting caught, Joanna turned the page and spent a good while pretending to take more notes. In truth, she was filling one page with pop song lyrics. Baby baby baby oh, like baby baby baby oh...
Her face stayed serious the whole time. A considerate joke. Han Gyeoul covered his laughter with a sigh.
The seats filled one by one. The strike teams seemed to use colors to distinguish affiliation, and the armed personnel entering the room wore masks with skulls painted in different colors. But since the colors were part of the camouflage pattern, they were hard to make out unless one looked closely. From a distance, even more so.
Each time, Han Gyeoul was introduced anew. Besides ‘White Skull,’ there were blandly named strike teams such as ‘Blue Skull,’ ‘Red Skull,’ and ‘Black Skull.’ Taking the various support teams into account as well, the total force was at the level of one reinforced Company.
‘That is not many at all.’
The scale of the maritime city rivaled the greater San Francisco area. Its population would be smaller, but even so, it was surely larger than most major cities. If they had been conducting a long-term operation with fewer than two hundred troops, the accumulated fatigue had to be considerable. Even allowing for organization members recruited from the refugees.
Chadwick snapped his fingers.
“Since everyone is here, let us get started.”
The screen at the front lit up. A map marking the operational area appeared. For Han Gyeoul, who had not yet finished reviewing the materials, there was new information from the start. The operation was not taking place only here.
“Before the full briefing and meeting, I have two pieces of news to share with you. Good news and bad news. Which would you like to hear first?”
One officer raised a hand.
“Bad news first. The aftertaste is cleaner if we hear the good news later.”
Chadwick nodded.
“Fair enough. Then I will tell you the good news first.”
Rough laughter spread. The Intelligence Agency team leader shrugged and changed the screen. A photograph was projected. It showed a huge artificial island in the middle of the sea. The land had no elevation differences, and the island’s shoreline, expanded to fit the runway and base, had no natural sections at all.
Many ships could be seen anchored along the shore. Most were civilian ships carrying refugees, but military vessels were gathered in one particular area. Han Gyeoul identified their shapes. At the very least, they were not U.S. Navy.
Chadwick continued.
“This is good news from Hawaii. The former Chinese military group that had been occupying Johnston Island and protesting accepted conditional surrender yesterday at 15:00 local time. Among the warships defecting as a result are two Type 94 nuclear submarines. That means twenty-four nuclear missiles. Excellent. The nuclear threat posed by anarchy has dramatically decreased. Now, everyone, let us give them a round of applause.”
Weak applause filled the room.
“And now, the bad news.”
The Intelligence Agency team leader cleared his throat, then put on an exaggeratedly gloomy face.
“The one we were chasing, Changcheng 9 or Ching-Chong 9 or whatever, has apparently escaped the encirclement.”
The room stirred. Disappointed sighs slipped out. Someone pressed a hand to their eyelids and grumbled.
“It sure knows how to slip through every gap.”
One of the CIA agents answered.
“It is living up to its name.”
“Name? Is Ching-Chang-Chong and the rest not all the same?”
“In their language, it means the Communist Party’s Long March. It was when the Chinese reds ran about ten thousand kilometers to escape suppression by the democratic government. On foot, too. It happened during World War II.”
“Six thousand miles on foot, huh... That is impressive, but why brag about being chased around enough to put it on a submarine?”
“You can glorify anything if you dress it up right.”
Chadwick snapped his fingers as he had at the start, drawing attention back to him.
“That is enough chatter. Well, since it came up, the crew of this damn Moby-Dick may believe the name of their boat is their mission. That their current flight might someday lead to the revival of their homeland. At the very least, the political officer aboard that ship is probably not sane. Ha ha.”
Chinese ships each had a Communist Party political officer aboard, responsible for ideological education.
Han Gyeoul thought,
‘Maybe this is connected to the mood among the Chinese people in these waters...’
Other ships might be different, but the political officer of a submarine loaded with nuclear missiles would be someone with extremely high loyalty to the Communist Party. In the first place, the Chinese military itself was closer to the party’s army than the state’s army.
If one of them was truly insane and had seized the initiative, the United States would be nothing more than a nation of imperialists. Compromise, let alone surrender, would be unthinkable. Han Gyeoul had not had many experiences involving the Chinese military in previous iterations of this world, but there had been a distinct kind of madness about them.
In an era with the end approaching, anything could easily go out of control.
============================ Author’s Note ============================
#Web Novels and Web Games
These days, I keep thinking that the serialization methods of web novels and the operating methods of web games are very similar.
Everyone, rest easy.
I will write a novel like Low Badugi.
#Q&A
Q. RGZ95: @ Mmm... Sudden Attack 2... That is too scary / Just how filthy did Han Gyeoul’s face become for them to say that? shudder
A. Hmm... about the level of going from ten legs to two?
Q. CommonKestrel: @ This is all because space development has not happened. If space development happened, many people would recover their childlike innocence while sweeping up everything worth money in unexplored lands.
A. Right. They would go big and smash through a planet’s crust to mine it, ancient relics would come out of it, corpses would reanimate, all living things would become one, the Brother Moons would awaken, and so on...
Footnotes:
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